Norris Roy Crump, aka Buck Crump of the Canadian Pacific was a reluctant Montrealer.The stubby, BC-born CEO was stationed here from 1955 while he ran the CPR but disiliked Montreal and moved immediately to Calgary as soon as his time ran up in 1974.
In Calgary he opposed the introduction of culture to the city, no joke, until he died in 1989. In the book Canada 2000 AD Crump predicts that his rapidly-expanding CPR would provide hypersonic aircraft that could fly 4,000 mph, six times the speed of sound.
He predicted "robot trains" where the driver could read a newspaper rather that watch the rails, automatically piloted cars and a "dial-a-bus system is possible.
A person could pick up the telephone and have a small, automatically operated bus directed either to his front door or to a nearby stop.The passenger would be notified of its arrival by a light on his phone."
Crump was keen on computers and this photo of the computer room in Windsor station might portray Montreal's first computer.
It’s not for nothing that Norris “Bullshit!*” Crump was so fond of computers…
ReplyDeleteRailroads were an early user of “computers”. When the Interstate Commission was setup in the US more than a century ago, it asked railroads to provide detailled sets of statistics, which could only be computed timely (and cheaply) with tabulating equipment.
Those were the ancestors of the computers; the data-processing punched card (“do not spindle, fold or mutilate”) was invented in 1881 by Herman Hollerith in order to tabulate the US census data.
Railroads were the heaviest users of tabulating equipment by the 1920’s, and when computers arrived on the stage, they quite naturally embraced them en masse.
* Thus was Crump’s deriding cry whenever someone lamented to him the passing of the beloved steam engine, for Crump was the driving force behind CPR’s dieselization…
Haha..."opposed the introduction of culture"
ReplyDeletePlease elaborate.
But serioulsy, Robot trains and Mach-6 sound sci-fi but they aren't thaaaaat far-fetched.
Keep posting stuff like this i really like it
ReplyDeleteWhere did you find that picture of Grandad.....I mean Buck Crump?? :),
ReplyDeleteBuck Crump? Sounds like a John Candy movie character.
ReplyDelete